Miss Dorothy tells me what I already know. ‘Poppy. Poppy Munro.’
CHAPTER 51
I wait inside the prison visiting room. Anxiety scrapes along my spine, my heart clenches with terrible tension. This room isn’t what I expect. I thought it would be two hard seats either side of a security window with a telephone to talk through. There are comfy blue and green chairs with an oval table in the middle. I should be angry because I don’t want this comfort to be part of Danny’s life, but why should the families of those that have done wrong be punished for the terrible acts of those they love?
The door opens. My anxiety skyrockets. The man who is my birth father enters the room escorted by a prison officer. After all the evil he has committed it gladdens my heart to see him in a wheelchair. His brow quirks in surprise at my presence. The prison officer retreats to the back of the room while Danny wheels himself to the opposite side of the table. Despite the very unbecoming regulation grey sweats his appearance has changed little. I’m not sure what I was expecting, for him to have been transformed into the devil.
Then I see his eyes. The pretend warmth has gone, replaced by a blue that is cold to the point of freezing. They stare, stare, stare. I won’t look away; the time when this man could manipulate me is long gone.
I tell him why I am here. ‘Poppy Munro was your first victim. She was the first person you sent to Pretty Lanes.’
He says nothing.
I keep pressing. ‘Did you know that Hope and Poppy were the best of friends? Hope’s mother showed me a picture of them together.’ If it’s the last breath I have I will torment him with what he did. ‘She was the first one you spotted at the Suzi Lake Centre.’ I see a reaction, a muscle throbbing in his cheek.
I won’t stop. ‘Poppy came from a close-minded, middle-class family and she thought that her parents wouldn’t approve of her being friendly with Hope, so they kept their friendship a secret. Hope and Poppy would change Poppy’s appearance by braiding her hair, usually in two chunky cornrows, and she wore sunglasses and sometimes a baseball cap. That’s why the police never made enquiries about her at the centre because no one knew she went there.’
Folding his arms across the table, Danny finally speaks. ‘You do know I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Malice enters his tone. ‘But know this: my lawyer will get me off these ridiculous charges. I never tried to murder you, he will show how it was you and Miriam who tried to murder me. For my money—’
I won’t be deterred by him. ‘You saw Poppy at the centre and, for whatever reason, chose her. You probably used that magic tongue of yours to get her to Pretty Lanes. But you miscalculated; you didn’t realise the family she came from was connected. This put too much heat on you. After you killed her—’
He jeers.
‘After you murdered her I think you burned her body in an incinerator at the hospital annexe. There was no way in hell you could allow the police to find her.’ Bile burns my throat at what I suspect was done to Poppy. ‘That’s when you changed your MO. Only choose the black girls. The black girls who were vulnerable, poor, from families who didn’t have access to resources to pick up enough slack to investigate when the cops wouldn’t. At the Suzi Lake—’
‘They took me to the library here.’ He speaks over me. ‘And do you know what the first thing I saw was when I walked in?’ He bursts into wild, shocking laughter, but there’s no joy on his face. The sound he makes is that of a snake hissing as it preys on the unsuspecting in the dark.
‘I’ll tell you what I saw. A plaque on the wall: “Opened by Suzi Lake”。’ He cuts the laughter dead. ‘The great and good Suzi Lake doing good deeds again. Everyone wanted a slice of Suzi and good old Suzi was happy to oblige. She gave her time to this organisation, this event, this charity body, prisons galore.’
His gaze is a blazing ball of blue fire. ‘The one thing she never had was time for me. Time for her little boy. She gave him everything he needed – money, a boarding school parents would rob a bank to get their children into, access to the good and the great who could get him a job. What she never had for him was her time. And everyone fucking compared her to me. How the hell can I live up to the legendary Suzi Lake?’
His eyes stab me. ‘She made me a patron of the centre but wouldn’t give me a spot on its board. Burning down the old centre was like burning her. Burn Suzi burn!’
The hatred for his mother who helped so many others is stomach-churning. Then I recall that time we were sat by the river and I told him about what had happened to me in the children’s home. How he’d told me that mothers can’t heal everything, that sometimes we need to heal ourselves. All this time Danny’s deeds were his warped notion of healing himself against his mother. How did I miss the hatred in his voice every time he uttered the word, ‘mother’？ But it also makes me want to bow my head and weep. How did a little boy grow up to despise the woman who nurtured him in her womb for nine months so much?